CLEVELAND, Ohio – You may have hated sharing a bedroom or vying for the attention of your parents, but if you grew up in a house with a bunch of brothers and sisters, they may be the reason why you’re not divorced.

And if you believe the studies that show that happily-married people are healthier and live longer, then you may have your brothers and sisters to thank for that, too.

Sociologists at Ohio State University are presenting research today that suggests that the more siblings you grow up with, the more protection you have against divorce as an adult.

The study findings don’t provide an answer “Why?”; that, along with analyzing data on sibling configuration (birth order, space between sibling birth, etc.) and the quality of that sibling relationship, is for future study, they said.

“We went into it with some expectations,” said Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, co-author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State's Marion campus.

“Some of the recent work [that colleague and co-author Douglas Downey, professor of sociology at OSU, conducted in 2004] suggested that kindergarteners with siblings rated more favorably [by their peers] than ‘only kids,’ ‘’ she said. “We wondered if that kind of thing would continue into adulthood.”

They, along with graduate student Joseph Merry, thought that there would be a bigger difference in terms of divorce when comparing ‘only children’ with people who had one or two siblings, Bobbitt-Zeher said.

“But that’s not what we found,” she said. “We saw more of a linear effect. The more you keep adding siblings, the percentage of divorce goes down.”

Each additional sibling – maxing out at about seven -- reduces the likelihood of divorce by 2 percent. More siblings than that neither helped nor hurt, they found.

They also found the protective effect apparent across generations, not just among today’s married couples.

The study used data from the General Social Survey, a gigantic set of data collected from interviews with 57,000 adults from across the United States between 1972 and 2012 that tracks social trends.

The researchers took into account a wide variety of other factors of the respondents they surveyed and their parents that may have affected the results, such as education, socioeconomic status, family structure -- whether a family is a single- or two-parent household, for example – race, age at marriage, religious affiliation and gender role attitudes.

None of those factors changed what the researchers saw between siblings and later divorce, Bobbitt-Zeher said.

“As sociologists, we are interested in how big population changes might have consequences in all sorts of realms of life,” Bobbitt-Zeher said.

“With the decline in family sizes, we wanted to take on looking at some of the long-term consequences.”

Having siblings means more experience dealing with others – communication, negotiations – with those skills seeming to translate well when it comes to having a successful marriage, the researchers said.

Research from Downey and Bobbitt-Zeher published earlier this year in the Journal of Family Issues showed that that teenagers without siblings seemed to grow out of any social skills disadvantages they may have had as younger children.

Other studies looking at the effects of siblings have focused on the positive results of smaller families, such as better grades among those with no or fewer siblings.

But the correlation between the number of siblings and divorce is the first study of its kind to look at a major event in adulthood, Downey said.

“I wouldn’t make life decisions [based on the findings],” Bobbitt-Zeher said. “I’m not going to have another child because I don’t want to have them get divorced.”

“It’s a meaningful effect, but a relatively small one,” she said. “There are many other predictors of divorce that are stronger than this one."

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